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The genius of black creativity has often involved making something good of the scraps - creating a delicacy out of undesirable, discarded parts. Sometimes, though, we get so excited about the resilience and transformative power of black people's creativity that we confuse the creative energy and talent with the creative output. In hip hop this has meant reveling over the ingenuity of hip hop's creative genius for using scraps from the urban landscape to make music - presenting exhilarating dances on cardboard in the street, reusing obsolete technical-trades equipment to rebuild stereos, telling stories on street corners in ways that made people in corporate offices listen - while at the same time ignoring the toxic conditions under which such creativity occurs.
This confusion between the genius of remaking and the final product reminds me of chitterlings. There is a crucial distinction between the genius behind turning pig guts into a grassroots delicacy and the actual chitterlings themselves...food that slave owners and their families would not eat. So, no matter how well they were prepared, no matter how much creative efficiency surrounded previous decisions to eat intestines, ears, hooves, and other animal parts, the context for African Americans' use of chitterlings-or chitlins as they are affectionately called - symbolizes not just black people's resilience, tradition, and creativity but also their mistreatment.

BLACK IS BACK AND

IT'S BOUND TO SALE:

Michael Jackson vs The Clark Doll Experiment

In 1939, psychologists and married team, Dr. Kenneth and Mamie Clark conducted a series of experiments examining race and self-perception. Blackamericanchildren were taken from both segregated and integrated schools and presented with two identical dolls to select from. The only distinguishing features between the dolls was that one was brown with dark hair and the other was white with yellow hair. The Clarks documented how the children responded to the following list of requests:

Episode 174 - Patriot Mythology
Running Time: 1:00:00
Description:Just because the MSM is wrong doesn’t mean the alternative
media is right. From spurious quotations to the JFK myth to the “fat Bin
Laden” video, join us this week on The Corbett Report as we do a fact
check on common misconceptions in the alternative media.

Arnold Schwarzenegger versus Sergio Oliva

"I was restored to consciousness by
the dashing of cold water in my face, and found myself leaning against my
brother's arm, while he bent over me with streaming eyes. He afterwards
told me he thought I was dying, for I had been in an unconscious state
sixteen hours. I next became delirious, and was in great danger of
betraying myself and my friends. To prevent this, they stupefied me with
drugs. I remained in bed six weeks, weary in body and sick at heart. How to
get medical advice was the question. William finally went to a Thompsonian doctor, and described himself as having all my pains and aches.

Here’s the rest of my 1989 interview with Ice Cube, in which he tells the story of a gig in Detroit that got waaay out of hand...

DAVID MILLS:
Was there any element of anticipation that N.W.A. would get a lot of
publicity by being extra hard and extra profane and extra violent?

ICE CUBE:
Nope, ’cause to us it ain’t extra. If you go onto any kind of
playground – elementary – you’ll hear the same words we talk about in
our songs. If you turn on any kind of cable TV, you’ll hear the same
words.

We didn’t invent no words. We ain’t teaching nobody
nothing new when it comes to that. They can’t blame us if their kids use
profanity. They can’t blame us for no crime rate in no city, because
there’s always been violence and there’s always been crime, wherever
there’s people together. ...

"Though health professionals often blame high-fat, high-calorie fast food
for contributing to Americans' expanding waistlines and related health
woes, more than one thirdof the nation's leading hospitals have fast-food restaurants on their premises.